First Contact | The Red Solstice - Mars Attacks

The Red Solstice is a top-down, real-time, tactical, 8-player, co-op survival game. Man that was long. It feels a little like XCOM meets Commandos in some ways, though with faster pacing, dynamic events, and pop-up objectives.

It's also confusing as hell.

Set in the distant future, across a Martian landscape ravaged by war, you're greeted by the gravelliest of gravelly voices intoning some guff about a massive storm and alien beasties. It's fairly difficult to take him seriously. I jumped into a multiplayer game straight away, which was a terrible mistake as everyone apart from myself and another poor noobish soul ran off and immediately began hoarding all of the items, and we had absolutely no idea what the hell we were supposed to be doing.

We'll save the multiplayer stuff for a Game Night in the recent future.

Thankfully, The Red Solstice has a tutorial prologue level, which I quickly jumped into after a massive alien ate everyone on my team, to help players get to grips with the basics. It's a fairly complex game, not helped by a control system that can seem a little overly convoluted at times. It handles a little like a clunky MMO in some ways -- the plethora of instructions available can be a little overwhelming in real-time -- but a few replays on, and I began to get used to it.

Still, here's a little vid of my first runthrough of the game's prologue. The Red Solstice is still in Early Access beta, and the single player element is nowhere to be seen currently, but if you fancy some multiplayer tactical action, you can check out the game's site here. As I say, there'll be a more in-depth look at the meat of the game coming soon, along with a Game Night next week.